Sarnia author returns home with first novel

Sarnia author returns home with first novel

Just to be clear, axe throwing doesn't appear anywhere in Helen Marshall's novel, The Migration.

Paul Morden, Sarnia Observer

Published on: March 7, 2019 | Last Updated: March 7, 2019 8:07 AM EST

Author Helen Marshall visits Valley Axe in her hometown of Sarnia Friday for some axe and knife-throwing before attending an evening launch event at The Book Keeper for her first novel, The Migration. Marshall grew up in Sarnia and currently lives in England.Paul Morden / /The Observer

Just to be clear, axe throwing doesn’t appear anywhere in Helen Marshall’s novel, The Migration.

But it’s a hobby she first tried growing up in Sarnia as a member of the Society of Creative Anachronism, so the axe and knifethrowing ranges at Valley Axe is where Marshall met up with The Observer Friday to talk about being back at home with her first novel.

The Migration was released this week by Random House in Canada and Titan Books in the U.K., where Marshall lives and teaches.

She made a visit home to Canada for the book release.

“The reaction has been really positive, so far,” Marshall said. “All of the reviews have been good, and I think the blogging community has really taken to it.”

Marshall, a World Fantasy Award-winner for two short story collections, moved to England several years ago for a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford, where she studied literature written in the days of the Black Death.

The Migration is the story of two Canadian sisters who move with their mother to England at a time when young people around the world are coming down with a mysterious illness.

“I think people are really enjoying the fact that it’s quite an uplifting book at the end, even though there’s some tragic notes to it,” Marshall said. “I think it’s happier than apocalyptic, in the end.”

Born in Sarnia to parents from South Africa, Marshall graduated from the former St. Christopher Catholic Secondary School and then left for university, earning a PhD from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto before attending Oxford.

Her parents still live in Sarnia. Marshall said she describes her writing as “weird fiction, which is a style that sits somewhere between horror, fantasy and science fiction.”

It’s an approach she likes “because it’s unsettling, and it often borrows from generic conventions but then does something a little bit different with them,” she said.

Marshall said that on this trip back to her family home she found herself rediscovering bits and pieces of who she was while growing up in Sarnia, and feels her former self would be proud of what she’s become.

Marshall is set to move to Australia in June to take a job at the University of Queensland, and then in August she’s marrying Vince Haig, a writer who publishes under the name Malcolm Devlin. They met while attending a writing workshop in Seattle in 2013.

“In some ways, I’m beginning my next migration,” Marshall said.

Her first novel was inspired, in part, by her move from Canada to England, she said.

“There’s kind of a weird irony that now that the book is finished I’m launching myself off somewhere else.”